"It's a most extraordinary thing to think out, Marjorie, that antagonism. Our love has kept us so close together and always our purposes have been--like that." He spread divergent hands. "I've speculated again and again whether there isn't something incurably antagonistic between women (that's _you_ generalized, Marjorie) and men (that's me) directly we pass beyond the conditions of the individualistic struggle. I believe every couple of lovers who've ever married have felt that strain. Yet it's not a difference in kind between us but degree. The big conflict between us has a parallel in a little internal conflict that goes on; there's something of man in every woman and a touch of the feminine in every man. But you're nearer as woman to the immediate personal life of sense and reality than I am as man. It's been so ever since the men went hunting and fighting and the women kept hut, tended the children and gathered roots in the little cultivation close at hand. It's been so perhaps since the female carried and suckled her child and distinguished one male from another. It may be it will always be so. Men were released from that close, continuous touch with physical necessities long before women were. It's only now that women begin to be released. For ages now men have been wandering from field and home and city, over the hills and far away, in search of adventures and fresh ideas and the wells of mystery beyond the edge of the world, but it's only now that the woman comes with them too. Our difference isn't a difference in kind, old Marjorie; it's the difference between the old adventurer and the new feet upon the trail." "We've got to come," said Marjorie. "Oh! you've got to come. No good to be pioneers if the race does not follow. The women are the backbone of the race; the men are just the individuals. Into this Labrador and into all the wild and desolate places of thought and desire, if men come you women have to come too--and bring the race with you. Some day." "A long day, mate of my heart." "Who knows how long or how far? Aren't you at any rate here, dear woman of mine.... (_Surely you are here_)." He went off at a tangent. "There's all those words that seem to mean something and then don't seem to mean anything, that keep shifting to and fro from the deepest significance to the shallowest of claptrap, Socialism, Christianity.... You know,--they aren't anything really, as yet; they are something trying to be.... Haven't I said that before, Marjorie?" She looked round at him. "You said something like that when you were delirious," she answered, after a little pause. "It's one of the ideas that you're struggling with. You go on, old man, and _talk_. We've months--for repetitions."